Also, FYI, the Icelandic word for island is "Ey" (common genitive joining form "Eyja"). You can still see it a lot in place names in the UK where it's accidentally morphed into "-sea" (stealing the S from the genitive of the prior word) - for example, "Swansea" was "Sveinsey" - Sveinn being a man's name, so "Sveinn's Island". Probably the most famous place you probably are familiar with the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which shut down air traffic - lit, "Of-Islands Of-Mountains Glacier", or "Glacier of the Mountains of the Islands". The "islands" in here are somewhat debated - the most accepted notion is the archipelago Vestmannaeyjar (the "Westman Islands"**, which is just offshore), though I've also seen it argued that it's about Landeyjar (lit. "Land-Islands")

(* "Fun" fact: "Westman" in this case means Irishmen. Two of the earliest viking settlers were Ingólfur Arnarson and his blood-brother Hjörleifur Hró(TH)marsson. Ingólfur settled Reykjavík, while Hjörleifur settled in the south, near Eyjafjallajökull and Vestmannaeyjar. Hjörleifur had a good number of slaves from Ireland, and he worked them very hard, making them drag the ard (primitive plow) as if they were oxen, and things like that. They ended up murdering Hjörleifur and fled to Vestmannaeyjar, where they set up their own settlement. However, Ingólfur, after discovering Hjörleifur's death, set up a raiding party which invaded Vestmannaeyjar and killed the rebel slaves. But anyway, the island chain is named after them)

But don't worry about your mistake. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who have told me that they kept wondering why there were so many businesses with the word "island" in their name, as though we were really proud of living on an island or something ;) Nah, it's "ís-land". Ice-land. Pronounced "EECE-lahnd", first syllable double the length of the other (like all words in Icelandic) :)

Sure, just 5x our GDP and we're all set to do that.

Sure it is, it's just north of Bústa(th)avegur, between Tunguvegur and Réttarhóltsvegur ;)

Ísland very much does literally mean "Ice-Land" :) Well, kind of. Ís is sort of a formal word for ice, a bit old fashioned, more common in compound words than on its own. If you're at a restaurant and you want ice, you order "klaki". If you order "ís", you'll get rjómaís, aka "cream-ice", aka ice cream. So in modern parlance, it's "Ice Cream Land" ;)

As for the name origin: it was named by Flóki "Raven" Vilger(th)arson, who found Iceland by releasing ravens from his boats (as land birds, they would have to return to the boat if they couldn't spot land, but would beeline for land if they could find it). He overwintered at Barðaströnd. It was an unusually cold winter, and sea ice was spotted floating in the water (something normally rare here), and so he named the country "Ísland". That said, I doubt anyone approaching Iceland from the south and east and sailing past the terminal glaciers of Vatnajökull (which covers something like 15% of the country) would have questioned it much.

Building buildings is a large portion of all human resource consumption, and they're generally designed to last for a good chunk of a century or so. Your plan is to change something that already consumes a large portion of our entire spending and accelerate it by an order of magnitude?

are up to 110m/s.

Relative to a surface 50-55km away. The superrotation of the atmosphere is utterly irreelvant. It is local turbulance that is of issue, not zonal windspeeds relative to some distant surface. And the simple facts of the matter is that local shear is lower than on Earth. These are facts. You can claim otherwise until you're blue in the face, but Venus does not have squall lines, it does not have cumulonimbus, it does not have supercells, it does not even have anything that could fuel those things. Its heating is highly uniform. It moves across dynamically stable lower layers, not across an uneven surface. It has uniform chemical dynamics that can be broadly described by altitude and latitude without major temporal variation. It is simply not a turbulent atmosphere.

Venus has some impressive atmospheric dynamics, but they're global scale, not local scale. Fast superrotation. Broad Hadley cells. Planetwide gravity waves. Etc. But these are not things that create turbulence.

God, I'm going to have to waste my time digging up papers for you that you could have just looked up on your own, aren't I? Here, section 2.5.2. See this? "The vertical eddy diffusion coefficient of Venus is estimated to be 0.2 m2 s 1 at the altitude of 45 km and 4.0 m2 s 1 at the altitude of 60 km"? On Earth, 1m2/s is "a calm day". Intense convection can be like 100 m2/s. I'll repeat: Venus is NOT turbulent. The middle cloud layer isn't as calm as Earth's stratosphere, but it's calmer than Earth's troposphere.

The shear force scales with length, not volume.

Aka, linearly a function of radius. Times the squared relationship of area equals cubed. Slotting in alongside the cubed relationship with volume/lift. So in a naive approach, the scaling factors are the same. In the real world, scaling factors are better than the same, because many things beyond structural integrity have a sub-cubed scaleup rate (for example, protective / anti-diffusion coatings have a radius-squared relationship)

Americans are 5% of the worlds population but pay for 75% of the commercialization of new drugs and procedures.

Americans are 15% of the world's GDP and account for 64-78% of pharmaceutical profits . The US has about 75% of pharmaceutical venture capital as well, but again it's wrong to equate venture capital with "commercialization of new drugs and procedures". There's a lot of VC simply because the US healthcare system is so extractive; that doesn't give you a distinction between people doing useful stuff and people just being parasites. Even a metric of "new drugs" is a poor metric, as it's common practice to make "new" drugs simply to evade or extend effective patent control.

A better metric might be percentage of global pharmaceutical sales. In that, the US is 40-50%. Which is higher than the US's share of GDP, but nothing like a 5 to 75% ratio. And even then it's distorted by the exorbitant price inflation within the US, so it's still not answering the question of what's useful development vs. what's merely parasitism. What you really want to look at is the percentage of drugs bought by countries that don't have a significant domestic pharmaceutical industry that come from the US vs. other countries that do (such as many places in Europe that have major pharmaceutical manufacturers)

I remember seeing a multi-part documentary about that guy.

My grandfather died the day after I set up snapshotting on my filesystem. Never again will I set up snapshotting on my filesystem.

I don't think la Presidenta thinks that far ahead.

It's not about what he thinks, it's about what his advisors think.

For a long time, he consistently referred to Greenland as Greenland. Then suddenly, in a press conference out of the blue, he kept calling it Iceland. Lead theory in the press here is that some of his advisors were discussing Iceland during a meeting about Greenland, and thus caused his confusion.

And there's little chance of piping Iceland's geothermal energy to Greenland.

That's not how it works. For example, our biggest energy consumer is alumium refining. There is zero alumium ore production in Iceland. Rather, the ore is shipped to Iceland (along with the graphite electrodes, etc), we refine it here with local energy, then ship out the finished alumium. Even the smallest of our smelters uses more power than all homes and businesses here combined. We also do the same sort of thing with ferrosilicon. It's effectively a way to export power without having to physically export the power.

I mean, to be fair, Denmark nearly did order Iceland evacuated during the Mist Hardships after the eruption of Laki.

We tend not to get "geologically-catastrophic" eruptions here like, say, Yellowstone. But we get "historically-catastrophic" eruptions surprisingly often, once every 100-200 years or so. For example, the largest lava flow on Earth in the entire Holocene is in Iceland, the jórsárhraun, from Bárðarbunga.

Take Laki for example. A 25 kilometer long fissure "unzipped". Lava fountains peaked at 800-1400m high. The eruption lasted for 9 months. The worst problem was the gas. To give some perspective: Pinatubo was the gassiest eruption of the 20th century, emitting a very high ~20 MT of sulfur dioxide (Mount Saint Helens by contrast was only ~1,5MT). Well, Laki emitted *120 MT* of sulfur dioxide. And 8-15MT of hydrogen fluoride, which is vastly worse. Normally polar volcanoes have little impact on global climate (volcanic climate impacts tend to be strongest poleward of the volcano), but Laki was so intense that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans and there was ice in the Gulf of Mexico. It disrupted rain cycles around the world and caused famines that killed millions (Egypt suffered particularly badly). Tens of thousands of deaths were reported directly from the gas in the UK (one presumes the sick and elderly who are vulnerable to air pollution). Weak harvests and the poor government response to it aggravated tensions in France, and probably contributed to the French Revolution five years later.

Regarding the latter... it's funny how things can come full circle. Because the French Revolution ultimately led to Napoleon, and thus the Napoleonic Wars, which led to Denmark losing Norway to Sweden, which led to Denmark clamping down on its remaining colonies (including Iceland), which created the local anger in Iceland that led to the Icelandic independence movement that ultimately led to Iceland's freedom.

But Laki is hardly the only one. Another good example is Hekla. If you look at old maps of Iceland, they commonly draw Hekla hugely prominently, erupting, using the scariest drawing style they can. Hekla became quite famous in the Middle Ages in Europe as being the entrance to Hell. It was written as being the prison of Judas, people claimed to see souls flying into it during an eruption, etc. It seems to have gotten its fame during the 1104 eruption, which dusted Europe with ash.

But there's so many more.

It depends on how fast it happens. Our buildings are not built for temperatures that low. A typical January day has a high just above freezing and a low just below it.

If change happens at the same sort of speed that housing is replaced / new infrastructure is built, yes, we can adapt. But I'm not sure how we're supposed to bear the cost of renovating every building in the country at once and dramatically expanding our energy production, if it were to happen quickly. There's also what it would do to our economy beyond those costs. Two of the main pillars of our economy are fishing and tourism. Shutting down of the North Atlantic circulation would likely crush both of those. Agriculture is also a growing industry, and livestock raising has long been critical here; the former would be crushed by drops in temperatures (it's already marginal), and the latter would significantly drop in yield.

I don't think people understand how vulnerable Iceland is to significant drops in temperatures. During glacial periods, Iceland undergoes mass extinctions of plants (for example, when humans arrived, there were only 3 (small-tree sized) tree species left in Iceland (downy birch, rowan, common aspen), with only the first common and the latter extremely rare). This happens because virtually the whole island ends up under thick glaciers.

There's already a NATO base here, at Keflavík (conjoining the international airport). It was abandoned in 2006 but it's been moving toward increased usage. That would surely be the primary base if the US invaded us.

I take talk of potential US invasions of us deadly seriously. Defending Greenland against European counters - and in general excluding European control of the North Atlantic as a whole - would be vastly easier if the US captured Iceland. Maintaining a major airbase in Iceland is *far* easier than in Greenland - much more infrastructure, much more population, milder climate, and most importantly, year-round ice-free waters for supply deliveries. And since we all know Trump wants Greenland for its mineral resources, what you generally need to refine resources is *energy*, which is what Iceland is rich in.

Incorrect. Venus experiences ridiculously violent storms

No. I literally wrote a book on the topic decades ago. Based on what we knew then (which again comes with massive caveats due to our low funding of Venus missions), the view was that Venus's storms were almost the same as those on Earth in intensity. I've done some reading on the results since then, and from an incomplete read of more recent literature, the view today is that Venus winds are are actually significantly tamer than what was known then. More recent data says that normal vertical turbulence is about 1-3 m/s and only peaks at 5-10m/s in extreme cases. By contrast, on Earth thunderstorms regularly have 10-30 m/s updrafts, and supercells can hit 50m/s. Venus simply has no large CAPE release like on Earth. No cumulonimbus, no supercells or squall lines. Also, back when I was doing my research for the book, lightning on Venus was thought to probably roughly as common on Earth. But the Parker Solar Probe data says that the whistler waves that were previously interpreted as lightning are actually probably magnetic reconnection in the outer atmosphere, not lightning in clouds. Based on this, lightning in the clouds of Venus is probably rare to nonexistant.

For something dozens to hundreds of meters in size?

You have your scaling factors wrong. Scaling up gives you slightly better volume- and mass-to-lift ratios for a given amount of structural strength, which you can allocate toward greater strength. In an naive situation, there's no change with scaleup, because your envelope's tensile strength (in the non-rigid case) has to increase linearly as radius increases linearly, the area doubles and the volume triples, so you have a r-cubed relationship with both envelope mass and volume. But in practice it doesn't work that way - for example, protective coatings are relatively fixed thickness regardless of scale. And there's many things beyond just the envelope, and again, they generally benefit with scale. So you save mass as you scale up, and if your main concern is resilience, you can allocate your saved mass towards increasing that.

Well, the idea behind these ultra-expensive schools is to have one's kids become childhood friends with the children of billionaires, and then continue that friendship in ultra-expensive universities, so that all that investment pays off in the form of one's kids becoming billionaires themselves, or at the very least members of the inner circle of billionaires. That is, one isn't paying for good education, but for good networking. So viewing these $70k/year as anything other than a financial investment is a serious judgment error.

And yes, that's valid for poor folk who end up admitted into ultra-expensive universities. They entire purpose of those is networking. Going to parties with billionaire teen friends and getting a far from perfect GPA pays off orders of magnitude more than not going to those parties and getting a perfect GPA, with the sole exception of those who want to follow an academic career, in which case, sure, focus on the GPA. Otherwise, focus on making rich friends. Those are the ones who get you high-paying jobs.

Also, yes, I'm being sarcastic. That doesn't mean this isn't true. It shouldn't be like this. Alas, it is.